Sailors from the Norfolk-based destroyer James E. Williams boarded a North Korean merchant ship that had been hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia, while two other Navy vessels tailed a pirated Japanese ship in the same region.

The Williams, which left Norfolk in July , was about 50 nautical miles from the ship Dai Hong Dan in the Arabian Sea when it received word of the pirate attack, said Lt. John Gay , a spokesman for the Navy’s Central Command in Manama, Bahrain.

The Williams dispatched a helicopter and ordered the pirates to give up their weapons via a bridge-to-bridge radio. The North Korean crew, which had retained control of the steering and engineering spaces, then confronted the pirates and gained back control of the bridge, according to a Navy news release.

Arrrrgh ye mateys, we are taking the ship and crashing it into the Statue of Liberty!

High seas piracy is common, and something that anyone who is on the sea has to be aware of and ready to deal with it. No link to terrorism, but I am sure that someone will find a dollar they made from the sale of the stolen goods that somehow made it to an Al Qaeda group.

If this is story is true, and who knows about that, since not controlling the bridge or machine spaces hardly seems a hijack, (of course holding the galley might well be just such a thing) Still, it is a damn fine use of the Navy. Having journied offshore I can say one of my great worries among many were pirates, although great caution and cowardice saw me thru all right.
Stealing a whole ship is not a minor feat and requires considerable resources. I bet there are some mad groups ashore somewhere. Still it was nice of the deep water folks to sting the evil a bit.

I’d say that within six months you can expect a M4TVM that does include some sort of plot by The Islahomofascists and the latern-jawed American hero breaking someone’s fingers to learn where the nuke (made from scraping the insides of the No Ko and Iranian reactors) is hidden. Within seven months it will be known truth that if the captian of the US ship hadn’t tortured the “pirates” and the so-called No Ko crew, they would have boiled the Indian Ocean to the bedrock.

I think the pirates based their actions on a movie. Wasn’t there a Steven Segal flick that roughly followed this plotline? Come on, people help me out. No shame in admitting that you know Segal’s oeuvre. For once, let Internet anonymity help a fella out.

Dammit, there goes this plot I had two weeks ago about a crewe of modern-day pirates boarding a mysterious cargo ship containing… wait for it… a half-naked cyborg ninja babe. It would have had everything: Pirates fighting ninjas! Naked breasts! Gore! Running battles on gang planks! With Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the ubercool anti-hero pirate captain (he survives ’cause he’s a good pirate who worships the almighty FSM)! And the guy who played Jonathan on Buffy as the quirky comic relief!

Actually, with this and the other ship the navy is shadowing, what we will see is the TSP issue orders that require metal detectors and liquid container removal for passengers boarding cruise ships. They’d even have to remove their shoes, except in those climes where they only wear sandals anyway.

THEN Rudy will say that the new Safe Haven Inhibition of Terrorism on the Seas (SHITS) program is due to 9/11 (which he was the hero of).